Newmobility.news is a trade mark of B2BNews Agency®, a fully independent spin-off of Belga News Agency, which focuses on bespoke business-to-business news.

A service for professionals in the rapidly changing mobility domain, providing a daily overview and synthesis of the top new mobility stories of the Belgian, Dutch and international press.
Enriched with useful links to the original sources and additional information, archived stories and exclusive new content and critical analysis by our expert journalists.
Featuring also a full searchable archive of more than 1.750+ (and growing) articles on the broad domain of mobility.

Making money out of the low emission zone chaos

The Green-Zones app lets you register your vehicle with its Euro standard and other specifications, and will tell you instantly whether you can enter a Low Emission Zone in 11 European countries /Green-Zones

With a quick count of 137 low emission zones (LEZ) throughout Europe today, ranging from temporary ones to zero-emission zones (ZEZ), it’s getting hard to see the wood for the trees. A German company, called Green-Zones, found a way to make money out of the LEZ chaos and tries to sort it out with a portal and an app for tourists traveling through Europe and professional fleets alike.

Actually, there are two companies based in Berlin – Green-Zones GmbH and GEMB mbH – that try to make a buck with environmental and climate services with two different business models. GEMB mbH is a classic emission management and advisory company for emission trading in the industry, active in Germany, Austria, and Poland.

Tourists and fleet

Green-Zones GmbH focuses both the general public – tourists with cars in the first place – and professional fleets by providing information on the constantly changing number of low emission zones in Europe, their regulations, and required vignettes or registrations.

By selling the Crit’Air vignettes for France or the Umwelt Plaketten for Germany, or in the case of Belgium, for instance, taking care of the obligatory registration for foreign vehicles, it tries to pay for the expenses, and hopefully, make some profit in the end.

Free portal and apps

Green-Zones says it runs a free portal with about 40 different websites in 23 languages, and offers a free app for iOS and Android in 9 languages. Both platforms provide information about the environmental or low emission zones in 11 countries today: Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Austria, UK, Spain, Sweden, Danmark, Finland, and the Czech Republic.

In the app, you can register one vehicle with its specifications, like its weight and Euro standard, among others, data that are used to give you an instant overview of which low emission zones you are allowed to enter in the different countries.

Necessary money

Adding a second vehicle to the app will cost you 1,99 euros, enabling address searches another 2,99 euros and having the possibility to look into future LEZ zones and restrictions yet another 1,99 euros. Another way to squeeze out the necessary money to finance the vast operation of gathering and translating data is the in-app purchase of the vignettes for all these countries.

For Belgium or other countries that don’t use an environmental vignette, but have ANPR cameras installed to check each vehicle entering the LEZ with its number plate, Green-Zones offers a service to register the car for you and issues its non-official vignette to prove the latter was done at the proper authorities.

Professional options

In the professional area, it is critical to be well informed whether a truck will be able to cross or deliver at certain zones in Europe. The Green-Zones Fleet App is available in three different versions: Professional, Premium, and Enterprise. They offer different map zones and different concurrent users at prices ranging from 29,90 euros up to 349,90 euros per month.

The professional version allows the management of up to 30 different vehicles when installing in up to 10 different devices. The premium version offers 150 different vehicles and 50 devices and enterprise version 750 vehicles and 250 devices.